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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

Two driverless cars are about to crash into each other on a tight mountain pass (maybe a bug that couldn't for see the accident).

There are 3 possible outcomes:

  1. Car 1 and Car 2 crash into each other killing all passengers.
  2. Car 1 with 3 passengers drives of the cliff, car 2 with 1 passenger survives.
  3. Car 2 with 1 passenger drives of the the cliff, car 1 with 3 passengers survives.

The cars can communicate with each other. The logical resolution would be to drive the car with the least passengers off the cliff to save as many lives as mathematically possible.

I don't know how I would feel about my car killing me although logically I wouldn't have a chance of survival anyways.

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Do the cars have a "drive forward at all costs" programmed into them?

The very reasonable and very logical assumption for the program to make is simply stop the vehicle, or reverse course until it finds a path it can take forward again.

Why would a car take into account the amount of human lives? If something is going cause the car to collide with something else it will decide if it can avoid that obstacle and do so, either by swerving or stopping.

What do you think happens in this situation currently with human drivers?

Are we holding machines to different standards than we hold each other?

Yes.

Not too long ago I had the opportunity to have a surgery performed by a robot controlled by a human surgeon. My wife was adamantly against it since there had been accidents previously with the robot other places in the world. Overall, the rate of incident was lower than the rate of incident for human surgeons, but to her that was not the important point.

There are people who will definitely hold machines to higher standards, and if they don't meet them, to them they are clearly inferior.

Surgical robots do not perform as well as traditional instruments.

I've talked to a few hospital executives and all have said that in most cases, these robots only cost them money and decrease the quality of the surgical procedures.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2526934/Surge...

I know that disregarding evidence because of association is a fallacy, but can you come up with a better source? I have to strain my memory to think of an accurate article written by the newspaper you linked.

I agree, I was hesitant to even use that link, I believe the Wall Street Journal is generally considered more reputable:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/robotic-surgery-brings-higher-co...

And another from a relatively reputable healthcare company/journal:

http://www.healthline.com/health-news/is-da-vinci-robotic-su...

Thanks! These are good articles.

I think the point being made is that being the master of your own destiny is one of the most valued ideas to most of us. Letting a computer decide whether I live or die is certainly a future I don't want

Exactly.

If the cars can communicate with each other enough to negotiate which one should drive off the cliff, they can communicate with each other enough to negotiate an emergency stop for both vehicles, or even plan out a more survivable wreck.

The only way to enforce the limited choice domain you presented is for the automated drivers to be operating the vehicles unsafely prior to the collision event. In that case, never mind the other car, because either car could be forced off the cliff due to a goat standing in the middle of the road.

Also, I'll program my driver to believe that its car always contains MAXINT passengers.

Would it be ethical to program an autonomous car to drive its passengers off a cliff to save for example a normal bus full of children? Would it not be the most logical and ethical thing for a computer to do in such a situation?

The problem with these hypothetical questions is that they all require some form of clairvoyance to ask them.

How do you know the kids would be saved by your sacrifice? How do you know they would die from your selfishness? How do you know that bus isn't actually filled with violent and dangerous felons being transferred to supermax while awaiting execution, and the guards on it aren't also corrupt to the core?

You don't have that extra information at the time the decision would need to be made.

The logical and ethical thing for the computer to do would be to switch over to emergency collision avoidance mode, and try to avoid damage to the one vehicle it can actually control. The authority to instruct a driver to put its passengers at risk would have to be vested in some sort of traffic control program capable of recognizing when the selfish behavior of individual driver programs might result in more damage and injury overall.

And that's a whole new can of worms.

Since this is Google, the passengers probably only count if they have Google+ accounts.

I fail to see how evaluating ( 0 > 0 ) would help the driver programs make a decision.~

4. Apply brakes and enable safety features for impending collision, notify police of crash and location.

Why would it do anything else?

It is too late to brake, the decision has to be made between the 3 options, no other options exist.

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